


I Need You. I Trust You. I Love You.

by TeyrianTimelord



Category: The Avengers (Marvel Movies), The Avengers (Marvel) - All Media Types
Genre: Anger, Angst, Clintasha Week, F/M, Hurt/Comfort, Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder - PTSD, Romance, Torture, What Happened in Budapest
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-09-02
Updated: 2015-09-02
Packaged: 2018-04-18 15:51:16
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,771
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4711643
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/TeyrianTimelord/pseuds/TeyrianTimelord
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Hawkeye and Black Widow remember Budapest very differently, but there is one part they both remember crystal clear: </p><p>The moment Clint and Natasha truly surrendered themselves to one another.</p>
            </blockquote>





	I Need You. I Trust You. I Love You.

**Author's Note:**

> This story actually came from this message sent to me by Nox-Owl: "I'm so pleased I stumbled across you your blog and your writings are amazing! For the prompt thing can you do Clintasha during Budapest? Maybe with Clint getting hurt and Natasha being a total badass in revenge? :) Thank you"  
> Usually I put all Tumblr prompts into "Festival of Prompts," but this turned out to be a special case. It took on a life of its own that most of my prompt one-shots don't, so I felt that it deserved its own story. 
> 
> Warning: I do not use the "graphic violence" tag lightly! Go at your own risk!

One time. Was that really too much to ask for? Just one goddamned time that Natasha and Clint could go on a mission together and stick to the plan. It’s not like she was asking for the moon and stars for Christ’s sake! For once, could they please do one assignment that didn’t involve everything going wrong? Granted, she knew that being a SHIELD agent came with certain occupational hazards. Bones had to be broken, eyebrows had to be singed off, it’s just another part of the job. No, it wasn’t the danger that drove her up a wall (hell, sometimes she couldn’t feel truly alive without it), it was the sheer consistency of either chance or Clint fucking something up. Happenstance she could deal with, her new partner’s tendency to improvise to an extreme, not so much.

“We had orders, Clint. Very clear and exact orders that could have made this a grocery run,” she growled, using her nails to slowly file away at the ropes binding her wrists behind the back of a chair.

“That’s bullshit and you know it,” he hissed back while fighting at his own restraints. “Fury’s instructions would have gotten us killed.”

Natasha rolled her eyes and let out a sardonic snort.

“Oh yes, Agent Barton, please lecture me on how impeccable your preplanning skills are. Forgive my foolish ignorance for not seeing how getting captured by the enemy is useful in this situation.”

Instead of responding, he simply grumbled slightly, as if too impatient and pissed off to even want to justify her antagonizing with a response. This only made her even more irate. Yes, he had been the one to save and recruit her to SHIELD, but she was getting fed up with Director Fury always pairing them up for fieldwork. If the last year had shown nothing else, it was that Natasha and Clint were anything but a cohesive team. Every assignment ended with an accomplishment done by the skin of their teeth and scathing partner reports in the final paperwork. Their clashing styles put water and oil to shame. She was a born and bred Soviet spy: receive orders, follow them to the letter, and do whatever it takes to achieve the objective. Period. End of story. He was everything the Red Room had not her not to be. He acted on impulse and conscience, let his emotions and instinct be in control, for better or for worse. She might have shot him by now if his word wasn’t the only thing keeping her from being prosecuted for war crimes.

“Tell me, oh wise one, how do we escape from this maximum security fortress _and_ bring in our arms dealer without one of the three of us ending up dead?” she jeered, half out of honest curiosity for his opinion and half just because she liked to watch him twitch.

“I’m working on it, Romanoff,” he growled back.

“Well work faster, because we have company,” she urged, hearing footsteps from the hall outside their cell.

Within moments, the door was thrown open with an ear-ringing _clang!_ as the huge solid metal met a solid concrete wall. As she was hoping, there was their arms dealer, wearing a sharp suit to rival any American millionaire. Excellent, maybe they could overpower him together and use him as a meat-shield to work their way out, she thought. But as soon as he stepped through the doorframe another man entered as well, and Natasha felt all the blood drain out of her face. She could be half asleep, drugged to hell, and have one eye ripped out and she would still be able to recognize Ruslan Kuznetsov from a mile away. He was an underling in the KGB trying to create his own private intelligence agency, and every so often would visit the Red Room to call in favors with friends and “borrow” agents for his personal assignments. Many times he had requested Natalia Romanova, and many times her superiors had told him she was too valuable to risk on someone so low in the Kremlin. It was horribly obvious by his smug grin that he recognized her too.

“I must admit, my friend, I did not believe me when you claimed your security officers had apprehended the infamous Black Widow,” he bellowed to their arms dealer in that terribly gruff voice she hoped she would never have to hear again. “I owe you a great deal for inviting me to this momentous occasion.”

He approached in lumbering steps and ran a thick hand through Natasha’s hair, making her cringe.

“Still as beautiful and red as always, I see! I commend your choice, Romanova, it suits you well,” he rumbled, leaning in closely enough for Nat to smell the rank of old Vodka on his breath.

Almost on a dime, he turned his attention to Clint, who was staring in confusion. He drilled his gaze on Hawkeye, but still kept his words toward Natasha.

“But what have we here? Everyone used to say that one of your best assets was your ability to work alone. Do you keep pets now? Or perhaps… perhaps you are the one on a leash. He is Agent Clinton Francis Barton of SHIELD, correct? Since when does a Black Widow work with SHIELD agents?”

Natasha held firm and refused to say a word, but she could not keep her toes or fingertips from trembling. She left all that behind. The Red Room, the Kremlin, the KGB, all of it. SHIELD was her chance to finally do some good after a lifetime of being used for evil. The last thing she ever wanted was for that to smack her in the face again, much less in the middle of a mission gone wrong with a partner involved.

“I asked you a question, Romanova,” Ruslan barked, turning on his heels to clamp a hand around her jaw like a vice, but she still remained silent.

After a few moments of defiant staring, a sly smile took over his fat lips and he gently, too gently, let go of her face. Without a single word, he backed away and reached a hand into his left suit pocket to pull out a Phillip’s head screwdriver about five inches long. Natasha felt her palms begin to sweat as he continued to meet her eye contact but casually strolled over to Clint. In a swift motion she would have thought impossible for such a large man, he drove the tip of the screwdriver right into the top of Hawkeye’s boot. And right through his foot.

Natasha bit her lip so sharply that the coppery tang of blood burned her tongue at the sound of Clint’s stifled scream. He was trying, Christ, he was trying so damn hard to keep from losing his composure, even though a crimson flow was streaming out of the hole in his boot as Ruslan gave the screwdriver a single twist before yanking it out again. There had been a mission in the jungles of Venezuela when Clint had taken a bullet to the abdomen while they were busting a human trafficking operation and it was up to Natasha to get him back to their extraction point in time to be saved. It was the most either of them had been hurt on a mission, but she would have given anything to be back there instead. Sure, he had groaned and moaned, but between the adrenaline and the shock, it was a hell of a lot better than this. That was a battle wound, this was torture. And this was for her.

“I ask again,” Ruslan said flatly, almost sweetly. “Since when does a Black Widow work with SHIELD agents?”

Natasha looked over to Clint and their gazes quickly met. Despite the agony that had painted his face red, he shook his head slightly. _No. Don’t tell him anything._ She nodded back before once again staring resentfully into Ruslan’s eyes. Torture was a part of Red Room curriculum. An agent worth her weight was capable of artfully using pain to extract information from her subjects. They had been tested on it, of course, and as in all things, Natasha had been top of her class. She knew what it took to break a human being in body and spirit until they begged for death. She was familiar with that singular scream that meant ‘I’ll give you anything you want, just let me die.’ Not once had she ever heard it in her life and felt moved to any kind of pity or mercy without getting what she needed. The mission comes first, and that’s enough to relish in the screams.

Her mind changed when she heard it from Clint.

Maybe she hadn’t seen Ruslan strike because her brain wouldn’t let her, or maybe she was just so well trained that the starting blow of an act was not enough to grab her attention. Either way, it felt as if she had blacked out for the quickest of seconds and awoke to see the screwdriver embedded in Barton’s left ear, blood gushing down the side of his contorted face. Ruslan was still gripping the handle, twisting it and jamming it and working it every which way, grinning from ear to ear as if the sound of Clint’s suffering was the sole source of all joy on earth. He just wouldn’t stop screaming that one terrible scream that used to mean she had done her job well. To hell with the mission. To hell with orders. To hell with composure. Her whole body was trembling violently, her eyes welling with tears she could not care less about. She trembled and trembled and trembled until the shaking elevated to full on thrashing, throwing herself against the chair and the ropes until it felt as if the whole world was quaking with her. It didn’t matter if they fought like cats and dogs or argued like a divorced couple; Clint was her partner. Clint was her _friend_. And she needed to save him. The ropes around her wrist snapped at the point where she had been scratching, and then all hell broke loose.

In less time than it took for him to even process that she was free, Natasha leapt onto the arms dealer’s shoulders and snapped his neck. Fuck SHIELD’s orders; he was irrelevant now and would only slow them down. By now Ruslan had turned to her, but even if he had hours to prepare for her attack it wouldn’t have done him any good. Natasha could have taken down an army. A fat man past him prime was nothing. She twisted her legs around his throat and despite his weight, effortlessly threw him to the ground. Blood was pounding in her ears and red was flashing over her eyes, giving her surrounding an eerie lull amidst the rushing violence. Time had slowed, so she used it to take her time. She grabbed the screwdriver from where it had fallen from Ruslan’s grip. It was lighter than it looked, slick with his sweat and Clint’s blood, but still felt satisfying in her hand. Fair is fair, she thought to herself. The air was almost completely still. Only makes sense to do unto him as he had done unto others.

She started on his ears, but something about it just wasn’t enough. His mouth was moving, his lips were sputtering, his face was blundering, but all she could hear was the drumming of her own pulse. Oh no, that wouldn’t do. Seeing him suffer was only a tease, she needed to hear him suffer too. So then she went to work on his eyes, being careful to completely destroy his eyeballs without going deep enough to damage his brain just yet. It was delightfully messy, gore and blood spattering her hands and her face, but it still wasn’t enough. She still couldn’t hear him! So she kept going, hacking away at other parts of his body like a butcher taking apart a cow. It was a tedious task to mutilate a man his size from top to bottom with nothing but a screwdriver, but she had learned to be resourceful. She couldn’t tell how much time was going by; it felt like hours but it could have been minutes for all she knew. All she knew for sure was that Ruslan had to pay, and he wasn’t allowed to die until he did.

“Nat, you can stop now!”

The cry was quiet, weak, but it suddenly wiped the red haze from Natasha’s vision and threw her back into the present. She was kneeling on the stone floor, her face, chest, and arms all drenched and dripping with blood. Ruslan’s own mother wouldn’t have been recognize the twitching pile of flesh and bone that was just barely alive, so mangled and disfigured. The world was color again, and Natasha could hear and smell and feel again. But she turned to the voice that had pulled her out of the haze.

Clint was still tied to his chair. His face was still covered with sticky blood and gleaming tears and his shoulders were slumped weakly, but his misty blue eyes were filled with concern instead of pain.

“Nat, you can stop now,” he repeated, this time more of an affirmation than an order.

Dropping the screwdriver, Natasha ran over and immediately untied her partner, swiftly catching him before he could face plant onto the concrete. She ripped off a piece of her shirt and gently stuck the wadded up fabric into his ear to staunch the bleeding, swallowing hard at the up-close reminder that he would never hear anything from his left side again, leaving his only partially functional right ear to be his sole sense of sound.

“Clint, I am going to get you out of here,” she promised, taking his hands in her own.

“Relax, Tasha, I’m not actually dying. I just feel like it,” he joked, despite the fresh tears of pain that were still just barely leaking from the corners of his eyes, but he quickly sobered. “You didn’t have to torture him.”

“Actually, I did,” she said just above a whisper.

She was trying to be one of the good guys, really trying, but she knew now that a small piece of her would never be able to fully let go of what the Red Room had instilled after so many years.

“You made a mistake when you let me live, Clint. I’m not cut out to be a part of SHIELD. I’m not cut out to be anything but a killer. You should have-“

“Don’t you dare, Romanoff,” he interrupted, pulling his hands out of hers so he could put them on either side of her face. “You have pulled my ass out of more tight spots than anyone else ever has. You have risked more and saved more people in the last year than most agents do in their entire lives. I keep putting in the request to have you as my partner because even though it doesn’t always go smoothly, you are the best damned hero I’ve ever seen and there is no one else I’d rather have watching my back when shit hits the fan. You’re my best friend, and I need you.”

Natasha choked trying to keep hold back… hold back what? Tears? Tears of joy? Of relief? Of something else? It was the first time she could remember that anyone had ever told her she was worth more than just her skillset, and valuable as more than just asset. Without even fully knowing what she was doing, Natasha threw her arms around Clint’s shoulders and held him in a tight embrace, as if she let him go he might fade away and all of this would just be a dream and she would wake up back in the Red Room. She took in a sharp breath when he wrapped his arms around her waist and hugged her back. Suddenly, it was no longer just comfort, but intimacy. Unabashed and unadulterated intimacy between them for the first time. Natasha pressed her forehead to his so that she didn’t have to look at anything but his eyes, and she let out an unintentional gasp when he twisted his fingers into her hair. Lightly, almost too lightly to tell, their lips brushed together in what was too faint to even be called a ghost of a kiss. Still, it was enough to say what each of them needed to say:

_I need you. I trust you. I love you._


End file.
